Are Bad Economic Times Good for Free Software? 357
Dog's_Breakfast writes "In a declining economy, software licenses become a luxury. Linux and the BSDs offer free alternatives. As the USA toys with the possibility of defaulting on its national debt (and thus risking economic collapse), the author wonders if this might not, at last, lead to 'The Year of the Linux Desktop.'"
Why? (Score:1, Interesting)
Bad economic times are good for anything cheap or free, which in turn ever-so-slightly discourage economic recovery by moving less money than would otherwise be spent for a particular good or service.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd argue against that because most people do not save money. They spend everything they have. If they save $50 on an image editor, that money doesn't go in the bank... It goes to buy something else.
It doesn't restrict the flow or money at all... It only changes which company gets it.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Insofar as software licenses are economically efficient and the proceeds of license sales fall upon as many people as possible you could be right. But if software licenses simply impose economic rent and the lions share of the revenues accrue to a few large corporations, which proceed to put the money in their checking account, its not so clear.
Open-source can also stimulate economic activity through sales of support contracts, new equipment, etc. What a recession does is it keeps people where they are, regardless of the sort of license they have -- they know what they have, they don't want to spend money learning something new, and the license they bought two years ago is still just as good today as it was when they were rich.
Switching to a free Linux is not cheap (Score:2, Interesting)
The cost of switching to Linux will be far more expensive than the cost of Windows/MacOS licenses. I had worked as a sysadmin before. No one pays sticker prices for Windows, not OEMs and not the enterprise users. The license cost is cheaper than you think. At the same time, Linux does not come entirely free. First is the cost of transition and retraining users. Next, a lot of enterprise users want an "enterprise" OS with associated support, and this stuff does not come free. (Take a look at support contracts for RedHat Enterprise Linux)
Apple proves the proposition false ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps FOSS apps have some advantage but Mac OS X is unix based so many run as well on Mac as they do under Linux. Some FOSS apps also have windows ports. So there does not seem to be a real economic driver for Linux on the desktop via FOSS apps either.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Open-source can also stimulate economic activity through sales of support contracts, new equipment, etc. What a recession does is it keeps people where they are, regardless of the sort of license they have -- they know what they have, they don't want to spend money learning something new, and the license they bought two years ago is still just as good today as it was when they were rich.
Open Source actually stimulates economic activity inherently - it makes people more productive. If people are using open source software, it (in most cases) is doing something that they want done, thus freeing up their time for other pursuits, or allowing them to be more productive in the same amount of time.
Re:Ubuntu Duke Nukem Edition (Score:2, Interesting)
"but everyone else values their time and does not have the skill to deal with all the flexibility and variety Linux has."
Not to mention the constant UI changes inflicted on newcomers. It used to be getting a GUI running in the first place was a barrier to entry. Now that Linux driver support is excellent and most distros are easier to install than Windows, the new barrier is frequent UI change.
No problem for geeks, but I don't even bother to interest non-geeks in Linux because unless you are a techy and willing to put in a few hundred hours getting proficient it's a waste of time.
People buy Windows because they are used to Windows and because it is the de-facto STANDARD (though Redmond can't resist fucking around with the UI a bit).
I detest Windows, but Linux UI designers don't give a fuck about noobs. They provide a useful free service, but that doesn't make it wrong to point out shortcomings.
Re:Open source cannibalizes ... (Score:4, Interesting)
So, Google would have used SunOS, and MS Windows Server licenses, to run the servers they salvaged from the junkyard.
I believe they could have acheived the same computing power growth, at thousands of dollars per server, when starting the company.
And it's not like companies like GOOG do generate any (direct and indirect) economic activity.
Re:Forget The Year of the Linux Desktop (Score:4, Interesting)
Fanboys like to brag about 10% marketshare and they have a platform that was fully formed 7 years before the first line of the Linux kernel was written. Apple also effectively had a 10 year head start on Microsoft in terms of ease of use technology. Apple was competing against MS-DOS with a far better system.
"fracturing" has nothing to do with anything. PCs and Android phones are a great counterexample.
Market success is about marketing success. You have superbowl ads, effective TV ads, and your own stores.
Despite all of this, the best that Apple fanboys can brag about is finally breaking the 10% mark and how it's been 20 years coming.
Torpedoed by what Microsoft had to offer in 1991...